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Miru would afterwards cook and eat her victims at leisure. Here was a new event in her history: the bowl of living centipedes had been disposed of, and yet Tekanae manifested no sign of pain, no intention to leap into the cooling, but fatal, waters. Long did Miru wait; but in vain. 'Only remember this do not speak against me to mortals. Reveal not my ugly form and my mode of treating my visitors.
"But there is such a thing as right and wrong," said the missionary; "and your ovens cannot alter that." "Give the kava to the rest," said Akaänga to the daughters of Miru. "I must get rid of this sea-lawyer instantly, or worse will come of it." The next moment the missionary came up in the midst of the sea, and there before him were the palm-trees of the island.
And you were always so opposed to taboos when you were alive!" "To other people's," said the missionary. "Never to my own." "But yours have all proved wrong," said the convert. "It looks like it," said the missionary, "and I can't help that. No reason why I should break my word." "I never heard the like of this!" cried the daughter of Miru. "Pray, what do you expect to gain?"
Having descended to the Shades, he beheld Miru, the horrible hag who rules them, and whose deformities need not now be detailed. She commanded him to draw near. "The trembling human spirit obeyed, and sat down before Miru. According to her unvarying practice she set for her intended victim a bowl of food, and bade him eat it quite up. Miru, with evident anxiety, waited to see him swallow it.
Now the flaming of Akaanga's torch drew near in the night; and the misshapen hands groped in the meshes of the net; and they took the missionary between the finger and the thumb, and bore him dripping in the night and silence to the place of the ovens of Miru.
Miru waited in vain to see her intended victim writhing in agony and raging with thirst. Her practice on such occasions was to direct the tortured victim-spirit to dive in a lake close by, to seek relief. None that dived into that water ever came up alive; excessive anguish and quenchless thirst so distracting their thoughts that they were invariably drowned.
"That is not the point," said the missionary. "I took this pledge for others, I am not going to break it for myself." The daughter of Miru was puzzled; she came and told her mother, and Miru was vexed; and they went and told Akaanga. "I don't know what to do about this," said Akaanga; and he came and reasoned with the missionary.
With one hand he held the bowl to his lips, as if about to swallow its contents; with the other he secretly held the cocoa-nut kernel, and ate it the bowl concealing the nut from Miru. It was evident to the goddess that Tekanae was actually swallowing something: what else could it be but the contents of the fatal bowl?
Thus it results that Japanese poems are, for the most part, impressionist; they suggest a great deal more than they actually express. Here is an example: Momiji-ha wo Kaze ni makasete Miru yori mo Hakanaki mono wa Inochi nari keri This may be translated: More fleeting than the glint of withered leaf wind-blown, the thing called life."* *See Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, article "Japan."
In particular, they warned him of the house of yellow reeds tied with black sinnet, how any one who touched it became instantly the prey of Akaänga, and was handed on to him by Miru the ruddy, and hocussed with the kava of the dead, and baked in the ovens and eaten by the eaters of the dead. "There is nothing in it," said the missionary.
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